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     | Monday, January 17, 2000 - 08:01 am  This raises the fundamental problem in trying to shine the light on credit report accuracy: no consumer is willing to display his entire report so everyone can see the evidence.
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| | Monday, January 17, 2000 - 08:31 am Ok, now we've switched the topic a little away from scoring and towards credit report accuracy (which is fine by me) and I'm going with it. There's a conflict in Fair Credit Reporting. Credit reports provided to consumers are supposed to be easily understood. In response to this demand consumers are provided reports that are "dumbed down." They don't contain all the codes and raw data that may be relevant to a scoring model. Here's an example from my own credit profile which, admittedly, I have modified a little by inserting %%% marks to blank out my name, portions of my address, employer and phone number. I have been told that the key test of whether an account is a consumer finance account, according to the scoring model, is the code number for that credit grantor. Looking at the first entry on the list, Banco Popular, you can see that the code number has been blanked out by consumerinfo.com with a stream of #######. I have been told if that second number is a 5 then the scoring model considers it to be a consumer finance account. Accordingly any/all of those accounts might very well be consumer finance accounts and I'd have no way of knowing. Furthermore, as you can see from my profile, I am high-risk. I have too many inquiries, owe too much on my credit cards and my profile history is too short (only from 2-98).
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| | Tuesday, January 18, 2000 - 05:22 pm I find this report format VERY hard to read. And you do have some more detail, yet you can't tell what type of account is reported. They do translate that info on all the merged reports I've seen. I truly believe EVERYTHING affecting one's credit worthiness should be disclosed to the consumer, in a readable format. Got a few questions: 1) What's that: "INPUT SSN ISSUED 1987-1989"? 2) Sean, did you contact the Southland Civic CU regarding the missing updates? Do I see only two open accounts? I would think that the lack of reporting for this account would severely lower your Scores. 3) How do the LOST OR STOLEN accounts impact on your Score? 4) Is the Score on the report? Do you have a recent Score? This is definitely an interesting report.
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| | Wednesday, January 19, 2000 - 02:13 pm 1) INPUT SSN ISSUES 1987-1989 is part of the Experian FACS+ system. This is a list of FACS+ alerts. Ask Max also mentions FACS+ a little. 2) I hadn't contacted Southland Civic about the delay, but I called them just now and they said, "Oh no, we update TRW every month." 3) The LOST OR STOLEN account information has no impact on my score. 4) No, the score is not on my report, my last known score FICO score was 645 on 4/21/99. Finally, you're right -- the report is harder to read but it offers more detail than other report formats I've seen. Here's the latest report and we can see that finally an inquiry dropped, but still updates are not there. On SCFCU that's 80 days and counting. As far as understanding the report let's try just one account and here's the explanation: Banco Popular (The name of the credit grantor.) 1-99 (The date the account was first opened) $1,900-L (The credit card limit) $1,396-H (The highest amount owed) OPEN (open) CURR ACCT (current and never late. Also possible: CURR WAS 30, CURR WAS 60 and CURR WAS 90). ####### (Banco Popular's TRW subscriber number) BC (Banco Popular's industry type: Bank Card) CRC (Credit Card) REV (Revolving Account) 1 (ECOA code: Individual account) 11-30-99 (Date of last update) $1,396 (Current amount owed) 2-99 (date the account first reached this payment level [on 2-99 my account was reported current]) (10) (number of months reviewed) CCCCCCCCCC (ten months of payment required/payment made) compare to FCNB which has a lot of 0 which shows no payment required. 4357############ (my credit card number) 11-99 (the date I made my last payment to them) $21.00 (my minimum payment as estimated by Experian} That's basically it. I have no idea if any of this information is useful to anyone, but believe me I am far from confident that a credit scoring model automatically discounts inquiries at exactly the 365 day mark. I also share Greg's skepticism when he says things like: C'mon, you did multiple linear regression techniques and the exact time to consider an inquiry just happened to work out to be 12 months exactly? Isn't that a little convenient? Perhaps 11 months or 13 months window on inquiries might be more predictive, but the statisticians were just too lazy to check it out, hmmm?
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| | Tuesday, January 25, 2000 - 12:46 pm Continuing update. Here is my credit profile as of 1/25/2000. Note that the items have not been updated. Banco Popular: 56 days and counting. Southland Civic FCU: 86 days and counting. You watch tho -- in awhile the information will show up and be backdated as though it appeared on exactly 12/31/99 or 1/1/2000 even though I know for a fact it wasn't there even on 1/25/2000. People gain and lose points for this all the time. I could be almost 90 days delinquent on my Southland Civic profile and it's not even reported yet. Amazing, no? P.S. I called Fair Isaac and they said that account age is considered in months, not days so running a score a month later (even if it's only a day or two) can easily result in a change in score. They claimed, however, that scores would only change upwards as a result.
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| | Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 11:00 am Another (and most likely the final update) on the situation, my 1/29 credit profile still shows that the items haven't been updated, but my 2/2 credit profile showed an update. At the time of my 1/29 credit profile the information on Southland Civic loan was 90 days old. Now on 2/2 we have an update and low and behold the account is updated through 12/31/99. Except that we checked all through January and that information was not there! Even though it's been updated and I'm happier the bottom line is still that all the information is 30+ days old and I'm probably losing points for that every inquiry. I doubt it's possible to get a perfect score because of that. I also feel that it's worth "timing" your applications for credit by checking your credit profile often.
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| | Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 12:15 pm Sean: Have you ever had a mortgage loan?
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| | Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 03:25 pm Yes, I have several mortgage loans right now through private individuals -- the seller of the properties that I own. I do not now, nor have I ever had a conventional mortgage loan. I've bounced the idea a couple times off of lenders and mortgage brokers, but always I've come up short for one reason or another. Either my score is too low, my income is too difficult to document, or they want too much down. Try this sometime: Tell a mortgage broker you own a property with an 85% LTV, non-owner occupied and you'd like to refinance. They tell you that normally they'll only go to 75 percent. Then tell him that's no problem because he can do a 75 LTV and the current private note holder will subordinate. Be prepared for a very shocked look on his face and the insistance that he will do absolutely no such thing. Why is that?
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